DeepIntent Taps Ad Tech Veteran Ian Colley as New CMO

NEW YORK, NY – May 12, 2026 – DeepIntent, a specialized demand-side platform at the forefront of healthcare marketing, today announced the appointment of Ian Colley as its new Chief Marketing Officer. The strategic hire brings a titan of the broader ad tech world into the highly specialized and regulated sphere of pharmaceutical advertising, signaling a significant moment for both the company and the industry.

Colley, who will report directly to Founder and CEO Chris Paquette, is tasked with leading DeepIntent's global brand, marketing, and communications strategy. His arrival comes as the healthcare sector rapidly pivots from generalist advertising tools to sophisticated, data-driven solutions built for its unique challenges.

"The standard for healthcare marketing has fundamentally risen as the industry advances toward increasingly personalized treatment amid ever-growing overall demand," said Paquette in a statement. "Ian has a rare combination of strategic storytelling and deep industry knowledge that will supercharge the way we bring new, innovative solutions to market."

An Ad Tech Heavyweight Enters Healthcare

Colley is a prominent figure in the advertising technology landscape, bringing nearly three decades of experience from some of the world's most influential tech companies. Most recently, he served as the CMO and Executive Vice President at The Trade Desk, a leading independent demand-side platform. During his tenure, he was instrumental in shaping the company's narrative as a champion of the "open internet," positioning it as a powerful, objective alternative to the "walled gardens" of tech giants like Google and Meta.

His leadership at The Trade Desk, which earned him a spot on the Adweek 50 list in 2023, was defined by a strong emphasis on data-driven decision-making, programmatic advertising, and the application of artificial intelligence to enhance campaign effectiveness. This background aligns seamlessly with the challenges and opportunities in modern healthcare marketing, where precision, measurement, and compliance are paramount.

Before his impactful role at The Trade Desk, Colley spent over 20 years at IBM, leading communications for several critical divisions, including IBM Cloud and IBM Global Services. This long tenure provided him with deep expertise in communicating the value of complex, enterprise-grade technology solutions to a global audience. His early career managing communications for financial powerhouses like Goldman Sachs and Barclays Bank further honed his ability to navigate highly regulated and data-sensitive industries.

The New Frontier of Pharma Marketing

The decision to bring a leader of Colley's caliber into a healthcare-specific platform underscores a major industry trend: the maturation of healthcare advertising technology. As pharmaceutical companies develop increasingly targeted therapies, the methods for communicating their value to specific patient populations and healthcare providers (HCPs) must become equally precise.

This shift has created a competitive landscape where specialized platforms like DeepIntent, Crossix (a Veeva company), and PulsePoint are innovating rapidly. The key differentiator is no longer just access to data, but the ability to integrate diverse datasets—such as clinical data, prescription claims, and media exposure—in a privacy-compliant manner to drive measurable health outcomes.

Colley himself highlighted the unique potential of this convergence. "As an industry that develops very high-value products relevant to very specific audiences, healthcare and pharma stand to benefit from advances in artificial intelligence and data science more than any other," he stated. His vision involves moving beyond simple ad targeting to a more holistic understanding of the patient and provider journey, ultimately optimizing the success of new treatments.

Navigating this frontier requires a mastery of complex privacy regulations, chief among them the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the U.S. and GDPR in Europe. The challenge for companies like DeepIntent is to build platforms that can leverage the power of data for precise targeting and measurement while upholding the strictest standards of patient privacy through robust de-identification and aggregation techniques.

Helix and the Future of Data-Driven Health

Colley's appointment is not happening in a vacuum. It follows the March 2026 launch of DeepIntent Helix™, the company's ambitious new healthcare marketing cloud. This platform represents the culmination of a decade of investment in health data infrastructure and is positioned as the foundation upon which the next generation of healthcare marketing solutions will be built.

Helix provides marketers with access to granular healthcare and media insights across an immense and highly specific dataset, encompassing more than 3.7 million healthcare providers and over 240 million de-identified patient lives. The platform is designed to empower pharmaceutical brands and their agencies to plan, activate, and optimize campaigns with unprecedented speed and precision across every channel, from connected TV to digital point-of-care displays.

The launch of such a powerful platform necessitates a world-class marketing and communications strategy to articulate its value and drive adoption. Colley’s primary mission will be to tell the story of Helix and demonstrate how its data-driven capabilities can solve the core challenges facing pharmaceutical marketers today: reaching the right audience, delivering a relevant message, and measuring the real-world impact on patient treatment and script lift, all within a privacy-safe framework.

Redefining Patient and Provider Engagement

Ultimately, the goal of this technological evolution extends beyond corporate marketing objectives. The promise of platforms like DeepIntent Helix, guided by the strategic vision of leaders like Colley, is to create a more efficient and effective healthcare ecosystem for all stakeholders.

For patients, particularly those with rare or complex conditions, this technology can mean receiving timely and relevant information about new treatment options they might not have discovered otherwise. By cutting through the noise of general consumer advertising, precision marketing can connect individuals with potentially life-changing therapies and support programs.

For healthcare providers, it means receiving pertinent data and communications about the latest pharmaceutical advancements relevant to their specific patient populations, helping them make more informed clinical decisions. This data-driven approach helps ensure that the firehose of medical information is filtered and delivered in a more meaningful way.

As Colley noted, the mission is to "significantly improve outcomes for pharma, healthcare providers, and consumers." His arrival at DeepIntent marks a clear commitment to this goal, leveraging the most advanced principles of modern ad tech to serve one of society's most critical industries. The focus now turns to execution, as the company seeks to prove that better data and smarter marketing can indeed lead to better health.